Public History Project Research Articles

Might a Sense of Place Approach Help the Public Connect to Brayford Pool’s Medieval Heritage?

It is challenging for people to perceive a particular aspect of an area’s rich history when it is not obvious, prominent, or interpreted (Hunt, 2021). This article draws on and develops this assertion by establishing the importance of the Brayford Pool in the Medieval Period (1066–1540) and explores the challenges people face when perceiving the influence of this time period within the current landscape. The article uses the perception aspect of Sense of Place as a framework to suggest that these challenges may be overcome through shared authority and public curation. The article argues that this approach could help to re-establish the importance of the area during the medieval period. The article then considers how the principal of shared authority might be applied to create a public history project on the medieval history of the area, owned by the different communities who live, work, study, and engage in leisure activities on and around Brayford Pool. Finally, it considers the way in which this might impact positively on the other aspects of a Sense of Place: how people value a place, how people describe and interact with it, and the importance of its sustainability.

Angelo 1563. City of the Council. A Public History Project in Sixteenth-Century Trento

This article describes the walking tours realized for the app Hidden Trento within the project Public Renaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present (PURE, 2019-2022). The app, free of charge and available at www.hiddencities.eu, offers four different urban walks through the lesser-known places of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Trento. One of these is set in December 1563 during the final days of the Council of Trent and is narrated by Angelo Massarelli, bishop and secretary of the assembly. The storyboard and thematic insights are based on what Massarelli wrote in his Diari during his almost 20-year stay in Trento. In addition to personal comments on the political situation and the work of the Council, this source offers much information on the city's social and cultural life. Through the app tour, Angelo provides the main elements of the Council's institutional and doctrinal history while drawing the user's attention to aspects of everyday urban life, such as street fighting and public order, hospitality and supplies, public factions, festivals, the production and selling of press prints and the repression of unorthodox religious ideals. The paper discusses the realization of this digital itinerary, presenting its methods of dissemination, highlighting its educational and didactic applications, and describing its uses in a museum context.

Postcolonial Italy, A Public History Project Mapping Colonial Heritage

Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage is a public history project which Daphné Budasz and Markus Wurzer founded in Florence in 2018. The project is designed as an independent, bottom-up initiative which aims to (a) identify and collect colonial traces, (b) provide critical knowledge on these traces in order to (c) trigger debate on colonial legacies and reflect on the social, political, and cultural consequences of colonialism beyond the academic context within Italy’s contemporary society. For the purpose of dissemination and accessibility, in 2019 Budasz and Wurzer created the website www.postcolonialitaly.com, which presents an interactive map that provides information about geographical sites related to colonialism. What started as a locally grounded public history project about colonial traces in Florence has over the past three years evolved into an Italy-wide participatory and collaborative venture. The map keeps growing by scholars who are working on colonial legacies in other Italian cities like Rome, Venice, Bolzano, Cagliari, Milan, Trieste, and Parma, and who are sharing their knowledge.

Hearing the Americas: Understanding the Early Recording Industry with Digital Tools

AbstractThis article describes the methods and arguments of Hearing the Americas, a digital public history project that illuminates the history of popular music and the recording industry from 1890 to 1925. We argue that the use of digital tools allows the website to integrate sound directly into writing on music and thereby explicate a series of historical arguments. The article examines three arguments advanced by Hearing the Americas, showing in each case how digital tools generate new insights. The first case uses mapping to reveal some of the specific ways in which the economic and social context of Jim Crow shaped the experiences of Black performers; the second integrates sound and text to reveal the origins of certain blues conventions in the racist stereotypes of minstrel shows; and the final case uses digital tools to argue that the marketing strategies of the recording industry throughout the Americas helped produce a key shift in patterns of globalization.

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston

A history of survival: preserving and working with an archive of single parent activism

ABSTRACT In this article, we relate the story of a grassroots feminist archive. Single Parent Action Network, a Bristol-based national organisation, curated its own archive with great care throughout its history. When the organisation was forced to close in 2016, this irreplaceable repository of records, documents and audio-visual material was unceremoniously dumped in a skip. Thanks to prompt action by two long-time SPAN workers, it was rescued and became the foundation of a public history project run by a university-community partnership. This project was structured around a History Group of community researchers, which met weekly. The project also included the cataloguing and preservation of the archive, in preparation for its accession to the Feminist Archive South. The project team carried out 27 interviews with former SPAN workers, members and volunteers to add to the archive, and also served to create connections between the project team and those who had been involved with the organisation. Finally, the History Group devised a number of creative outputs including a piece of public art, a film, and a series of commemorative mugs. The article reflects on some of the tensions and difficulties that emerged during this work.

Archives of Military Courts in Colonial Congo: New Sources for the History of Violence and Agency in Central Africa

AbstractThis article offers an overview of the recently rediscovered archives of the Conseils de Guerre—the military court—of colonial Congo (1885–1960). As a long-considered lost collection of court records encompassing seventy years of testimonies of colonial military crimes, these archives offer unparalleled insights on the complex relation between law, impunity, and armed violence in colonial Central Africa. The article first sheds light on the history of those records and on their ongoing digitization in the context of debates about the contested heritage of Belgian “displaced” colonial public archives. It then sketches out several promising avenues for academic research and public history projects that they could help document, notably on the controversial history of violence in the Belgian empire and on the multifaceted nature of African agency under colonial rule.

For a New International Public History

Proposed in the United States of America in the 1970s, the term “public history” is now used in various parts of the world. The internationalization of the field of public history raises various questions about its definition, its practices, and its theories. Based on sometimes long-established practices, public history reflects new approaches to audiences, collaboration and authority in history production. The article distinguishes and analyses the different phases of internationalization in the 1970s, 1990s, and 2010s and argues for a new international public history. Instead of a spread of public history, the new internationalization lies upon multicultural approaches and understandings of the field. Symbolized by the rise of public history in Italy, the glocal process of defining and practicing public history – where the local practices and theories relate and influence global definitions – provides more nuanced and richer understandings of the field. The new internationalization has concrete consequences on the public history structures, resources, languages, and projects.

Complicated Pasts, Promising Futures

This overview article explores the nature of public history on the island of Ireland, discussing current trends in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Family history and digital history are highly popular ways of engaging with the past, both on the island and among the Irish diaspora, who have a voracious appetite for engaging with their heritage. Given that the island contains a postcolonial society (Republic of Ireland) and a post-conflict one (Northern Ireland) attention is given to the ways that these difficult pasts are engaged with by communities, through examining the histories of Mother and Baby Homes, The Troubles, and dark tourism. This article also briefly comments on who is involved in public history. Academic historians are engaged at state and local levels, and are often turned to as experts in the field, but grassroots public history projects which offer participatory ways of doing history are growing. This article emphasizes the high levels of engagement Irish and Northern Irish publics have with their history, however, it also suggests that public history as a radical method of ‘doing history’ is still in its relative infancy.

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Reaching into the Community to Interpret Labor History

Review: Public in Public History, edited by Joanna Wojdon and Dorota Wiśniewska

Review: <i>Public in Public History</i>, edited by Joanna Wojdon and Dorota Wiśniewska

Digital Editing Workshops for Building Campus Public History Communities and Developing Student Leaders

This paper presents an approach to designing editing workshops related to digital public history projects based on archival materials at institutions of higher learning. These events engage campus communities in the practice of public history and create opportunities for students interested in archives and digital humanities to develop professional skills. The model draws on the experiences of faculty, staff, and students who have contributed to Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection, a pedagogically focused project that explores methods for the collaborative online publication of selected personal papers and correspondence of local African American leader Eartha M. M. White (1876–1974), held in the Special Collections of the Thomas G. Carpenter Library at the University of North Florida. Although this article focuses on designing workshops in the context of higher education, the model discussed can potentially be extended to other contexts beyond the campus.

The Memory of Southern European Dictatorships in Popular TV Shows

Ever since the ground-breaking historical mini-series Holocaust (1978), television has proven to play a major role in structuring the collective memory about the past.1 This medium has, moreover, displayed a capacity to trigger a collective rendering of, and coming to terms with, painful, hidden or forgotten aspects of the past. Media specialist Garry R. Edgerton has even argued that ‘television is the principal means by which most people learn about history’.2 Even though such assertions might be tempered by today's predominance of social media – especially in generational terms – an inquiry into the politics of memory in popular television is still relevant for the field of public history, as well as for memory studies. This is particularly pertinent when representing dictatorship in the European South. Alongside public history projects of all kinds (including museums, memorials, commemorative plaques and practices), filmic representations (be it for cinematic or television use) structure the collective imaginary about the recent past. This essay briefly discusses TV shows that deal with and shape public understandings of the dictatorships in Spain (the final phase of Francoism, post-1968), Greece (the Colonels’ dictatorship, post-1969) and Portugal (the final phase of the Estado Novo (New State), post-1968).

Book Review: Adina Langer (ed.) Storytelling in Museums

The concept of narrative expresses that a representation is not a mere reproduction of facts, but an interpretation of a happening. Within the museum field, this concept has become very popular because two perceptions intersect within the discourse. The first one emphasizes that interpretations are shaped by the perspective of the narrator, which implies the exclusion of other perspectives. The second one sees stories as an effective means of communicating content to an audience. Both ideas are suitable for breaking the exclusivity of museums and giving a voice to marginalized social groups. This close interweaving of political and pedagogical ambitions also characterizes Storytelling in Museums, edited by Adina Langer, which excellently reflects the discourse around the concept of narrative. The eighteen chapters present a broad range of museum and public history projects.

Minds and Hearts and Digital Data. Collaborative Learning With Jesuit Manuscripts &amp; Databases

In a conversation with Emanuele Colombo, John O’Malley explained his historical method in eight points. In describing them, he noticed how “sources are mute” and how “to make them speak I must ask them questions”,[1] “the continuities are stronger and deeper than the discontinuities,”[2] and “if I really understand what is going on, I can explain it to an intelligent ten-year-old.”[3]This article aims at presenting the strategies and outcomes of a Public History project that involves on the one hand Jesuit sources of the early modern period, and on the other, non-professional historians who never studied the history of Society of Jesus.[4]

When Do You Stop Arriving? The Project “We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Histories in Rural California”

This article highlights a new public history project, “We Are Not Strangers Here: African American Rural Histories in California,” which examines hidden histories of African Americans who have shaped California’s food and farming culture from early statehood to the present. I detail the project’s archival content, including an overview of its methodological framework and the stories featured in its public components. I also pay special attention to the design of the project’s public engagement, including its recently launched traveling banner exhibit, accompanying podcast, and in-development digital exhibit. This essay thus illustrates the dynamic opportunities that public humanities projects like this one present in amplifying important, under-told state histories.

“It Has Made Me Think”: Engaging the Public with the History of Health in the Modern Irish Prison

Since the establishment of the modern prison system in the early nineteenth century, prisons and prisoners have been construed as sites of moral, social, and biological contagion. Historic and contemporary studies show that most prisoners experience severe health inequalities, higher rates of addiction and mental health issues, and lower life expectancy than the rest of the population. They also come from deprived social strata. Yet, these aspects of Irish penal history have been largely neglected in academia and popular histories. Our article discusses two public history projects—an art installation, The Trial, and a museum exhibition, Living Inside—that engaged different publics with the long history of health and welfare in Irish prisons. Developed by the research team on the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award “Prisoners, Medical Care and Entitlement to Health in England and Ireland, 1850-2000,” based at University College Dublin, the projects adopted different methodologies to engage their audiences and explore the experience and management of health and welfare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish prisons. We further examine the different methodological approaches of each project, their varied aims and audiences, and the impacts reported by audiences and participants. The article also considers some of the challenges of doing this kind of public history, both in terms of working with marginalized communities and presenting research about difficult subjects to various audiences.

Lessons Learned from Building Lessons: “Teach It” and the Development of Digital Primary-Source Classroom Activities

Lessons Learned from Building Lessons: “Teach It” and the Development of Digital Primary-Source Classroom Activities

Pages of Resistance

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The Pages of Resistance exhibition project is a digital humanities and public history project dedicated to the study of slavery and rebellion during the slave trade era, occurring in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1800s. Its focal point is the curation of a travelling exhibition on enslaved Muslim African literacy, conceptualized in this paper as a form of spiritual resistance to bondage. The inspiration for this project is based on the digitization of three sets of nineteenth-century Qur’anic and non-Qur’anic manuscripts found on the bodies of enslaved Muslim Africans after they perished the night of the Malês rebellion in January 1835 in Bahia, Brazil. The Pages of Resistance exhibition project, which currently concentrates on Brazil, is a part of a broader initiative that is focused on Muslim African diasporic history during the Atlantic slave trade era. It is a collaborative initiative between cross-disciplinary researchers and creative producers engaging in digital scholarship and multimedia art production. This article discusses the concept and Public History of the Pages of Resistance project as well as the context in which it is situated, and it describes the methods applied in the research process of this multilingual initiative. In doing so, this project reflects other anti-racist initiatives in the field of public history, situating itself between the intersections of Blackness, memory, religion, and resistance by marginalized groups and minorities.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Howard Zinn’s Public History

Howard Zinn and his popular book A People’s History of the United States have been left out of conversations regarding the development of public history. Although Zinn did not identify as a public history scholar, his methods and goals offer lessons for public historians today. At the same time, his approach comes with warnings for what public historians should avoid. By considering public history through Zinn’s perspective, we can clarify goals for our public history projects today.